Alumni Archives - Page 2 of 11

The Hike to Home – Jess Rinker (’14) on her Upcoming Release!

June 14, 2022/in Alumni, New Releases, The Writing Life /by Ceredwyn Bagley

VCFA WCYA (Summer ’14) Alum Jess Rinker is set to release her fifth book on July 5th, 2022! Get the inside scoop on her middle grade adventure, The Hike to Home, here!

1. Tell us a little about The Hike to Home in your own words.

The Hike to Home is about a girl who sets out to find her own adventure. It was sold on proposal, and then switched imprints when my initial imprint closed. When it changed hands, it also changed editors and vision, which turned out to be a wonderful thing because my new editor really pushed me hard in developing my idea into a more complex, heartfelt story. But what didn’t change was what I knew I wanted to write about from the beginning: a story about kids hiking the AT on their own, an unconventional mother/daughter relationship that was still full of love, and a girl who knew a ton about nature but not so much about kids her own age. There are a lot of autobiographical elements in this story.

2. Tell us about your characters. Were they inspired by anyone you know or knew growing up?

Lin, the protagonist, is based on me, but with major changes in life experience/situations. We both grew up somewhat isolated from our peers and pop culture, but for very different reasons. Learning the names of flora and fauna everywhere is the constant that binds us. As a young person I devoured wildlife identification books and I’ve always had some kind of wonder and satisfaction at knowing the names of the little creepy crawlies as well as big beautiful blooms and more majestic creatures. I also had a TON of freedom as a kid to explore the woods, so I really wanted these kids to find adventure in their backyard like I used to. Tinsley is based largely on my expressive, creative daughter. And Leo really represents the smart, sweet boys I’ve known in my life, the boyhood that exists before it’s crushed by toxicity.

3. Finding a castle in the woods sounds like a great adventure. What motivates these characters to try to look for it? What does it symbolize for them? What did it symbolize for you (if anything?)

Lin is desperate for a grand adventure like she’s used to having, so when she lands in NJ she thinks there can’t possibly be anything exciting there, which just compounds her grief of missing her mom who was always her adventuring partner. (Mom isn’t gone, just away for a bit) When she makes new friends and learns of the legend of the castle, she thinks it’s exactly the kind of adventure Mom would have taken her on, so she sets out to prove she can do it herself, with a bit of revenge motivation. Besides, it’s just New Jersey, what could go wrong? The other two are not used to having the same kind of adventures or freedom that Lin has had, so they are pretty enchanted by her, which leads them all into some sketchy situations.

I think the castle mostly represents any goal or dream, honestly. Without castles, we don’t climb mountains. Without climbing mountains, we don’t know how strong we really are.

4. What draws you to middle grade as an age group?

Initially I wasn’t drawn to it, to be honest. I didn’t think I could get myself in that mindset because my own middle grade years were pretty fraught with chaos and dysfunction, and so when I channel myself back that’s where my brain first lands. It takes a lot of work to sift through that to get to the heart of a twelve/thirteen year old. It’s a wonderful age and now that I have landed in that category, I really love it. It’s become easier to separate my own traumas, and sometimes cynical outlook, and focus on the beauty of that age, how it straddles this amazing brink of childhood and adolescence where kids are still imaginative and dreamy, and yet becoming much more responsible and self-aware. I get to write stories that I would have read at that age–little escapes and adventures with a bit of life-lessons and hard knocks. There are resounding themes of friendship, feminism, and allowing girls to explore their world in all my middle grades books, and it’s really fun writing to those themes without knocking my readers over the head with didactic messages.

5. What were some of the things that inspired you to write this story?

Honestly, I wanted to write an adventure story that was set in an unexpected place–New Jersey. Most people don’t think of New Jersey as having particularly natural topography, but it is the Garden State for a reason! There might only be a small portion of it preserved, but that portion is completely gorgeous. And a small section of the Appalachian Trail does go through the northwest corner so it’s based on a real area. I wanted to showcase the small, sweet Delaware river towns I have lived in (Newbridge is a fictional amalgamation of them) along with the vast wildlife and beauty that might not be consistent with some people’s ideas of New Jersey.

I also wanted to show a family that looks very different from the nuclear example that tends to get put on a pedestal. Although Lin’s family is somewhat nuclear, they don’t live suburban, stationary lives. They are on the road almost all the time, Lin has never attended public school, and at the start of this story, her mom has gone away for a year, which Lin is very unhappy about initially. A big part of the story is Lin coming to an understanding that her family can change how it looks, but still be close and loving, and that dependable friends can also become family. It doesn’t all have to rest on Mom’s shoulders!

6. Tell us something cool about yourself! What have you done recently that you’re proud of?

Well, no big adventures for me lately, but I did recently learn how to blow glass and make actual functioning pieces. I’m working for a brand new glass studio in Wardensville, West Virginia, and learning the craft was part of the perks of onboarding. The fact you can walk into the shop, and come out with a vase is mind boggling. I never thought it was something just anyone could do, but anyone can do it! Doesn’t mean you’ll have a beautiful piece, but you can have a working piece.

A professional glass blower creates a beautiful work of art in Mallorca.

The really cool thing is that it’s such a different creative process than writing in that you cannot be in your own head. You must be fully present, aware of your surroundings, and in the moment. There’s most definitely a mindfulness that’s required to work with glass, something I don’t stretch that often because I’m usually on a computer. Anyway, it’s really fun, and challenging, and I’m super excited to be working there and to witness other people learn the trade.

7. Do you have a favorite urban (or rural) legend? If so, what is it?

I think the castle legend is my favorite. I mean, I made it up for this story, but it’s based on real abandoned castles which exist on the east coast, often Scottish or Irish replicas and usually built by rich white men, maybe trying to duplicate home? I’m not sure. But I love the idea of trekking through the woods in search of ruins and in fact this story initially sparked when my husband and I once did exactly that. We literally hunted down a castle through small-time explorer’s blogs and Google earth, and it was SO FUN. But I can’t disclose the castle name or location because technically it was trespassing. (Shhh!) But here’s a glimpse:

(Shhh!)

8. What area of the world would you most like to explore?

I would love to visit a lot of places, but lately the Scottish Highlands have been on my mind. I pretty recently found out I’m nearly half Scottish, which was surprising because I think I look more like my Italian family and have mostly identified with them. But I’ve also always lived on the Appalachian trail, be it in NJ, PA or now in WV, which isn’t actually on the trail, but certainly Appalachian, and where Scotch Irish settled. I’ve learned so much about the history here, and Appalachian history is my own history, so now I’m dreaming of going to the origin of that ancestry. This book explores a teeny-tiny bit of that, with the legendary castle and the creation of the Appalachian mountains, but I don’t want to give too much away…

9. Do you think the physical act of exploration enriches the childhood experience or may be a necessary part of the coming of age experience?

100%. Whether a child lives in rural and small town areas as I have, or urban, or anything in between, a little bit of freedom goes a long way. I worry that that freedom gets harder and harder for parents to grant because it seems like we live in scarier times than the 80’s when I was growing up. When my own children were growing up, I tried to give them as much freedom as I could but it was definitely a lot less than what I had. Freedom also means sometimes taking away things that kids enjoy, which is sometimes challenging. For example when my kids were little I would unsubscribe from cable service every summer to help enforce more outside time. (Cable? God that makes me sound old) But they became so used to it, it was never an issue, and all three of them have a strong appreciation for the natural world now, which makes me very happy. I think it’s really important to not always hold the reins too tightly and to push your kids towards self-entertainment.

10. As someone who has moved around a lot, experienced the loss of a home to a fire, and finally settled in a rural area surrounded by forest, what do you hope your readers learn about the meaning of home?

Home is, and always has been for me, the people I am with. I have moved dozens of times in my life, so I have never become overly attached to a building or even a place (although NJ has a special hold on my heart), but my true home rests in my children and my life-partner (even when that partner has changed) and my closest girlfriends. I’d like for young readers to know that surrounding yourself with the right people is what builds a real family and home. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s life, it just needs to be what you need/want. And I think the idea that “adventure is everywhere” echoes this in the sense that we can find wonder and mystery anywhere, if we look for it. It doesn’t have to be some grand world exploration, it can literally be in your backyard, or small town, or city.

You can find more writing from Jess at www.jessrinker.com!

‘Making Social Media Work for Your Book’ – Autumn Krause, ’14

May 20, 2022/in Alumni, The Writing Life /by Ceredwyn Bagley

We’ve all heard it. If you are a traditionally published author, unless you are the Chosen One of your publisher and they give you a huge marketing campaign or unless you somehow have old money and can hire a fancy publicist, your own efforts to market your book won’t make much of a difference in the long run. And it makes sense. For example, even if you get 100 people to buy your book, for a traditionally published book, that isn’t very significant (though I’m certain I speak for all authors when I say it is very significant to us. Every single book I sell feels like a miracle to me!). But social media can be used to make your marketing work and help your books reach more readers.

Throughout the years, social media has changed in ways that make it easier for authors to reach their readers.I intentionally use social media as my own little department of marketing for my books and have had the most success with reels on Instagram. Reels and TikToks specifically can be helpful for authors because they are put into their own algorithm that reaches beyond people who are following your profile.

Even though I’ve only been posting about two reels a week, my reels reach 747k individual accounts a month (you can check your insights to see your reels reach). And there are concrete results: after a few went viral, my book dropped down into a Top 100 Bestseller list on Amazon (it beat Shadow & Bone for about a day! Gonna carry that with me).

How I create reels that work for me:

Have an interesting audio. And it doesn’t have to be trending! I’ve had a few reels go viral without a trending audio. I pick audios that I find interesting or funny and try to link them to experiences most of my audience have had or will have. For example, this is me illustrating my writing process, a universal experience.
Tell a story. This works great for me because I love using reels to capture the writing life as I experience it. Here’s the story of how I got my deal with Harper Collins.
Be original, but conscious of trends. I try not to copy trends exactly but I’m aware of them so I can take part but put a little spin or variation to my reels. I always love making them my own.

With consistency and creativity, reels and TikToks are a fantastic way for authors to have fun and reach readers while spending zero dollars!

Autumn Krause is graduate of VCFA’s Writing for Children and Young Adults program (Winter 2014,) and works as a writer in Orange County, California. In addition to writing for young readers, she provides editorial content for a wedding website and interior design magazines. She is most often found wearing a black lace dress and boots.

‘When Children’s Books Offend’ by Jennifer Gennari ’06

May 12, 2022/in Alumni, The Writing Life /by Ceredwyn Bagley

I love revision. I invite my editor brain to many cups of tea, as I read aloud, scribble on paper, cut and paste and delete. From those first drafts to the end, my word choices are studied by many smart and meticulous eyes—from my agent to my editor to the copyeditor, in those final moments before it goes to print.

Still, we grow and change. Author Mitali Perkins once shared that when one of her earliest books was reprinted, she took the opportunity to remove a stereotype. I’ve already done this, too: for the paperback edition of Muffled, I rewrote four sentences to edit out the words “normal” and “crazy,” because I had inadvertently offended.

I have a few words, too, that I would remove from my debut, My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer. The middle-grade novel was my creative thesis, and in 2012, it was published by Houghton Mifflin. It’s the story of June, whose family experiences anti-LGBT prejudice. I based the story in Vermont, where I’m from, augmenting my memory with research on the civil union law, the legal precursor to marriage equality.

In 2000, some Vermonters pushed back against the new civil union law (“Take back Vermont”), while others demanded that Vermont should keep “civil” our discourse and accept each other.

The book was mostly well-received, except for one scene outside the library.

A reviewer said it was “one-sided,” and that the adults opposed to the civil-union law were unrealistic, “offering inappropriate, unwelcome advice to June.” The imagined dialogue included hurtful things being said at that time: her parents could get AIDS and that queer people shouldn’t be allowed to have children.

Would I revise my book, given the chance? I would certainly remove the racist “cowabunga” hollered as they jump into the lake. But in the library, June is seeking the truth. She reads letters to the editor, including a reference to pedophiles. She doesn’t know what the word means, but she understands the hate. And then the adults outside the library passing out flyers insult her family.

The level of anti-LGBTQ+ attacks today make this scene look almost quaint. In the name of free speech, open discrimination is prevalent. In Florida, prejudice is being enshrined into law. And books, including mine, are being banned in Texas, Pennsylvania, and other states. The new wave of book-banning is organized, forcing teachers to remove books from their classrooms and endangering the lives of LGBTQ+ youth. Under the banner of “parents’ rights,” they are denying all children the chance to read the books they want and need. As many have noted, a banned book is not an honor. It means the children who need to read these books won’t find them.

Every children’s book author I know respects our young audience. We write to tell the truth and to offer hope. And that is what I believe My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer does, which is why I wouldn’t change that scene. June experiences something terrible, but she survives the bullying and later finds the courage to take pride in her family. She inspires me to stand up fiercely for all the books under attack.

To learn how you can stop book banning, visit PEN America’s website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jennifer Gennari is the author of Muffled, a Junior Library Guild selection and Georgia Children’s Book Award finalist, and My Mixed-Up Berry Blue Summer, a Bank Street Best Children’s Books of the Year selection and an American Library Association Rainbow List title. A WCYA ’06 graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, she lives on the water in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.jengennari.com.

‘The Healing Power of Writing and Why I Love VCFA’

May 10, 2022/in Alumni, The Writing Life /by Ceredwyn Bagley

Hi! I’m Ceredwyn. You may also know me as Kate Pentecost, VCFA alumnx and author of Elysium Girls and That Dark Infinity. I’m the new Program Assistant for VCFA’s Writing for Children and Young Adults program, and I’m thrilled to be taking over the Wild Things blog, the various VCFA social media accounts, and helping with residency. But today I want to talk about writing, death, and VCFA.

The first time I considered dying was also the first time I considered the alternative: living forever. I was eight years old and I’d just come back from a church service that heavily featured the idea of eternal life, how when we got to Heaven, there would be no end. I contemplated that. The idea, however terrifying, lodged in my brain and would stay there for what seems so far to be my entire life.

Four years later, when I was twelve, a character appeared in my mind one day and decided to stay there. He was a tall young man of around nineteen or twenty, tall and lean, almost gaunt, with olive skin, dark eyes, and black hair that touched his shoulders. He liked the color black, I knew, and was some sort of a solitary mercenary. A girl followed after that, with chin-length red hair she’d cut herself, wearing a man’s tunic and clearly out of place. Her name, I knew, ended with an “a” and went from Dahlia to Dara to eventually Flora. The young man’s name was much more difficult to find. And there in the year 2000, typing away ay my enormous, blocky desktop I set about penning what I concluded was the most epic of fantasies at 149 pages.

The original story was nothing spectacular. It was derivative (I was twelve!) and had little in the way of style (I was twelve!) and honestly was similar in tone to the Shrek films (again, I was twelve!,) but my life had a direction. I was going to be young adult fantasy author! I continued revising and submitting and getting rejections throughout high school and was accepted to the University of Houston’s Creative Writing program.

Then life became hard.

During my first semester of college in Houston, I was sexually assaulted off-campus. A month later, my grandmother, whom I’d spent almost every day with growing up, died after a stroke and I wasn’t able to be there at her deathbed. Suddenly, I found myself dealing with two very different types of grief: the major but inevitable grief of a loved one dying and the grief for oneself and one’s body that accompanies PTSD, and which I wouldn’t admit to myself I had. I failed three classes in my major that semester as I insisted that nothing had really happened and that I was just being lazy or weak.

Still, it hurt so terribly. It hurt all day and the only relief I got, in sleep, would begin all over again whenever I woke the following day. Desperate to heal from this unending cycle, but afraid to tell anyone what had happened, I did the only thing I knew how to do: I tried to write my way out of it, to escape into the fun fantasy world I’d created and loved so much. But a writer can never divorce oneself from one’s circumstances.

The story changed from underneath me, grew darker, even as I was accepted to VCFA’s WCYA program, my dream writing program. My second semester advisor, April Lurie, encouraged me to lean into the darkness and stop trying to make the story fit what I wanted it to be but couldn’t be anymore. I allowed a darkness to fall over the book. The appropriate darkness. I scrapped what I’d written and rewrote it, starting over seven times before April told me that it felt authentic.

In this new version, Flora came to share my story of survival of sexual assault. As for the male character, I wanted my readers to feel what I felt through him somehow, that cycle of pain and grief that resets every morning and never seems to end. And as I let myself confront that and examine it, the character finally began to speak to me authentically. He had a curse, I realized. A curse that hinged on, not quite immortality, not quite death, but the worst parts of both. Something that caught him in an endless cycle of death and resurrection but never peace or permanence. That was his quiet yearning, I learned, and finally, as I studied poetry, he told me his name.

I am Lazarus, come from the dead/ Come back to tell you all. I shall tell you all.
– T.S. Eliot, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
– Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath

I studied craft and characterization, drafted chapter after chapter, packet after packet, and as I did so I threw myself also into studying death, to make it feel real, to understand what it would feel like to die. I studied grief, depression, PTSD. I learned that when you die your hunger goes first, then your smell and taste, followed by your sight, which dims as you slowly lose sensation and finally hearing. I threw myself into understanding this strange character who had always been with me and who was so important to me for some reason. But it is to the other character, Flora, that I owe the most.

As I learned more about her with Mark, April, Susan, and Louise, I realized that since her struggle was my own, I had to understand how to make myself better to help her reach the healing she needed by the end of the book. I sought therapy, worked as a crisis counselor for RAINN, examined my sense of guilt about what had happened, and eventually was able to forgive myself and ultimately heal. Even death, which I had always feared, I came to understand and to accept.

I found that what I was learning at VCFA helped me to deeply study these characters whom I realized eventually were parts of me, and thus study myself. Just as the characters help each other to heal in the book I was writing, what I’d learned about grief from studying death for Lazarus helped me understand how to help heal Flora. Both of them (and my advisors’ guidance) helped me to heal myself through the power of my own creation.

This book, That Dark Infinity, has a special place in that it is the book of my childhood, my adolescence, and my growth into a healed adult. It became my creative thesis and was the book that got me my agent, Sara Crowe, who is fantastic, and it was published in October 2021.

A lot of this I owe to VCFA and my advisors and classmates, which, I suppose, is one of the reasons I’m so excited to be able to work here. But I wanted to share the greatest wisdom, writerly or otherwise that I have been able to learn so far: wherever you are, whatever you’re going through, look your situation in the face, come to understand it, and keep going.